Health Meters or Regenerating Health?

Obviously someone was looking out for you but didn't want enemies finding your tools.

Regenerating health bars work if there aren't very many places you can hide during a battle. If the enemies are in your face enough, you still have to fight them and hope they don't hit you while you're regenning.

I'm in favor of regenerating health as a general rule, because I'm pretty much bored of attrition as a gameplay mechanic. And even if you want to keep attrition, I think bullets and/or MP are a more natural source of it. The shifted focus towards challenging isolated encounters is nothing but a good thing. If any individual encounter poses no threat to you, then what's the point of playing?

That said, a lot of implementations are pretty bad. Not in favor of hiding around a corner until you regenerate, for example. Preferably it would only happen when the encounter is deemed to be over in some sense.

The purpose of putting items in hidden places is to reward exploration and give the stage more depth than simply moving forward and shooting. If you play well then you might not need to, if you screw up then you should slow down and explore the environment for something that might help you.

Now, there can be an aspect of Guide Dang It! when it comes to finding well hidden items, but because something can be done badly doesn't mean it invalidates the entire concept. Half-Life 2 did this well by hinting at the locations of hidden item caches, sometimes overtly but sometimes subtly, and having simple puzzles that rewarded you with items to break up the action.

edited 28th Apr '14 9:49:17 AM by Talby

@stephanreiken: I believe that, when we refer to "health bars" in this conversation, we're using it as a shorthand for non-regenerative health mechanics, rather than referring to the UI bar itself.

Either or, really. Depends on the game and what genre it's in.

Both are viable in their own right, but a mix of both is fine by me. In Mabinogi, you regenerate HP slowly, and not as slowly when you Rest. But one must take Wounds into consideration (represented by black on the HP bar), which can be slowly regenerated on it's own when Resting, especially near a campfire. Obviously, Potions are there for immediate use for HP and Wounds (as well as bandages for the latter), but downing too many in succession will result medicinal poisoning.

I don't see how "slowly" is a mix of both. What you describe is the opposite of the regenerating health being considered.

@stephanreiken: It matters because when people mean by health bar they mean by the traditional health system of health pickup and no regeneration...

@Talby: and most games just don't bother with hint...instead they put things in the most improbable places possible.

In the end, I'll Just gonna link my post on the 1st page on what system might work better than either static health medkit only or full, quick regeneration...

^ It depends on the design on either going on pure attrition or isolated encounter...slow regen is a bit of mix of both due to the fact that isolated encounter means that you still have to do resource management but will not get completely screwed over because at least you have some regeneration to help you out, unlike the standard health pickup system. I prefer STALKER way of health really...

Also forgot to mention: roguelikes...then again that one focus on inventory attrition more than health...

edited 29th Apr '14 3:40:22 AM by onyhow

One potential problem with a slow regeneration system, I find, is that if the game doesn't keep the pressure on the player (preventing the player from stopping for too long) it can encourage the player to simply park their character somewhere and wait until they're healed.

I've seen this happen (and done it myself) in Shadowcaster, which had a (horribly) slow regeneration mechanic for both health and mana: one enters the fray, fights until seriously injured, then retreats to a place of safety and leaves the game until the character is healed.

(In all fairness, Shadowcaster does also provide healing items and a character that can convert mana to health, but even so there are plenty of situations in which it's more tempting to just park the character and come back in half an hour.)

It's true that the player needn't park their characters so, but doing so is arguably a dominant strategy—since it provides significant rewards for little-to-no risk—and I'm inclined to feel that having the dominant strategy be non-fun in a game that aims to be fun is poor design.

All of that said, I could see slow regeneration working if it is connected to player activity—something like the regeneration mechanic used in Desktop Dungeons, which regenerates health and mana as the player uncovers new tiles, if I recall correctly.

edited 29th Apr '14 8:30:33 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

^ The biggest problem with slow regen systems is they are often too slow. Anything less than 5 HP/sec is basically a case of it's quicker to throw your life away and respawn than regenerate or find healing which defeats the whole purpose of health anyways if you basically devolve every scenario into being either alive or dead as opposed to say living but damaged or living but damaged yet recovering.

Take Battlefield for instance. In Battlefield 3 regen takes quite a while to kick in and it's pretty much too slow of a rate at 5 HP/sec. In multiplayer there's plenty of times where it's simply cheaper and easier (and dumber) to throw yourself at the enemy and die then respawn than wait for healing or regeneration. Especially since the medkits don't heal much faster. (In the single-player you seem to be under the constant effects of a buffed up medkit.) It gets worse in Hardcore mode where there is no health regen which effectively removes most playable kits from the match.

Yes, reliance on medkits and non-regenerating players severely limits the tactics, playstyles and even customization if present of the players themselves. That's not fun unless you're some kind of masochist (which is why Hardcore modes are often unpopular compared to everything else) and it's not good game design to shunt off basically half or more of what the game can do.

edited 29th Apr '14 8:53:07 AM by MajorTom

I prefer non-regenning hp in most cases, or slow regen if hp regen has to be in.

I quite like how Monster Hunter and Marvel vs Capcom do regen. As you take damage, a part of the health bar will empty in a different colour. If you can wait without being hit (or in the case of Marvel vs Capcom, switch out that character for a while), that section will regen slowly. It imo rewards you for not being hit again for a while (but doesn't make hp restoring items pointless, as it can never fully regen the meter) and it encourages switching characters around in a team fighter as it means that beat-up character can return to the fight later.

However, in solo fighters and games like Mario or Legend of Zelda, I think hp regen should be avoided. In Mario and Lo Z, item collection is important, so removing hp items would destroy a large portion of the challenge (I really like Yoshi's Island, but outside of insta-kill hazards, nothing is that much of a threat).

Worst game to have hp regen I have played is Fable 3. They took away hp bars and replaced it with bloody screen instead (which made telling how much hp you have in single player and local co-op impossible) while giving insane hp regen on top of insane amounts of hp. Because of this, you literally had to try or be half asleep to die in the game (and because of the bad bloody screen, you wouldn't know until it was too late). And then they game infinitely stacking hp restoring items on top of that.

edited 29th Apr '14 3:46:18 PM by mudkipz

Meters because I feel that a game's challenge level is higher with health meters.

^^ Eh, BF 3 health regen isn't bad...Chivalry is WAY worse...and BF 3 DOES have method to accelerate healing...which I think is a necessary thing in a game that use slow regeneration.

edited 1st May '14 2:11:22 AM by onyhow

^ But the method is not much better. (And worse pigeonholes you into a single kit on servers with health regen OFF.) 10 hp/sec is still very slow and given how 99% of players are complete retards you can't rely on others to help you so you'll almost never have medkits available if you yourself don't want to play medic that round. (And given that basically every map save Metro has overpowered vehicles which make the Medic class somewhat useless the Medic build really can't be depended upon.)

Just to check that I'm interpreting your numbers correctly, when you mentioned rates of healing (such as "10hp/s") am I correct in taking it that the game in question has a maximum health of 100 hit-points?

(After all, 5hp/s is actually pretty fast in games like The Binding Of Isaac, in which one could easily have a maximum health of 5 hit-points.)

(I don't play Battlefield, and have only limited exposure to most modern-combat games.)

edited 1st May '14 2:39:16 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

^ Yes. 10 hp/sec in a 100 hp soldier.

And the average enemy bullet does 12 or more damage and can be fired up to 2000 rounds per minute in BF 3. Slow medkit healing is very slow by comparison.

edited 1st May '14 7:40:37 PM by MajorTom

Which still stack with standard health regen, so unless you're suppressed you should be healing much faster...

And you're saying like older Battlefield games you can heal without medic...or have regen. Because I don't remember either of those when I played 1942 or 2...although admittedly I played those 2 a long time ago...

edited 1st May '14 8:33:38 PM by onyhow

Ouch, yes. That sounds as though it is effectively very similar to the health regeneration used in Shadowcaster (an old first-person dungeon-crawler), which I think that I mentioned earlier; in that game it's very tempting to simply park the character in a safe place and let his mana and health regenerate while the player goes and does something else for about half an hour (at a guess).

Shadowcaster did have healing items, but of course the temptation is to save the healing item for some later, more urgent use, and waiting for regeneration to have its effect is arguably a dominant strategy when no danger threatens.

(There's also a healing character, but that trades out mana, which regenerates in the same manner as health, and has similar restoration items, as I recall.)

edited 1st May '14 8:07:56 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

I dunno, I was never bothered by health regen in Battlefield 3 or 4.

I never even use a medkit.

I prefer a bit of a mix of the two - something like Mass Effect 3 or Sleeping Dogs where your health will only regenerate to a certain amount or Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag where your health will not regenerate in combat. In the former case especially it punishes you for getting hit too hard, but prevents Unwinnable situations due to lack of health.

Dungeon Siege does it pretty nicely. Your party members slowly regenerate health, but most of the forces you face are hordes of monsters, and without a healer or plenty of potions, you'll still die. Worse, the potions work immediately but the animation stops you from attacking until it's over. The enemies aren't hindered by this.

You'll probably need a healer in the party.